mp3s need to be encoded at 44.1k sampling rate (called “bit rate” by some programs), last time I checked. Particularly not VBR! See the first post in this thread, near the bottom. I had best luck with this using lame; if you’re on windows there are plenty of lame frontends you can use.

Ok, this is quite a weird issue. I just got to the point of the tutorials when I add an animation. While copy and pasting, swfmill suddenly started crashing, without any error messages.

I started making various changes to the Shoot.xml to hunt for it. I dont know how I found it, but by removing two tab characters on line 32 (the only characters on that line) swfmill crashes. I add them again, it can create the swf files, without errors. Remove them again, back to crashing.

I have no idea what could be causing this! I mean, those characters shouldnt even be seen by the interpreter according to the xml standard.

I want to know why this strange behaviour occurs and how to prevent it. Shoot.xml currently feels so fragile that I hesitate to add anything to it. :p

Just tell if you want to see the entire file or anything.

Edit:
Found another crash. If I changefor (var i in _root.ship)
tofor (var i in _root.ship.enemies)

swfmill crashes, revert to make it work again, of course, then the game doesnt work :p
What on earth is going on with my swfmill install?

I don’t see how the second thing can possibly cause a crash. swfmill doesn’t even read your actionscript files. Doesn’t touch them directly at all!

What it does do is take the swf generated by mtasc (which does read the AS files) and inject code and data structures into it.

So, that’s a bit awkward… it seems like some kind of extremely unlikely condition to do with the exact binary layout of your mtasc generated swf file.

You can try uploading everything you have somewhere and posting to the swfmill mailing list, but it’s quite inactive and the original author is mostly working on other things.

It seems a little suspicious that these bizarre crashes would suddenly start happening after no problems for a while. Only thing I can suggest would be to try a different version of mtasc or swfmill. :/

I tried a later (experimental) version, but it gave the same crash in the same way. I checked the svn repository of swfmill, the latest commit to the trunk was a year ago, the trac issue tracker seems to be used mostly by spamming bots, no irc channel or forum just a mailing list that doesnt see much activity.

What bugs me the most that its a real hard crash, not that swfmill gives me weird error codes. If this happens again later, when the project is bigger, it will probably be a real headache to figure out if it was me or swfmill.

It is also a shame, the lack of open source tools is the very reason I havent looked into flash until now. Your tutorial changed that, so kudos to you :) but, sadly, I cannot see the swfmill project as anything other than dead.

Yes, it’s a real shame. swfmill is a very useful tool but nobody seems to want to maintain it. I don’t really have the know-how or the time myself.

I know that a lot of people use it successfully in real project, I’ve talked to plenty of such people online, but there are some little things it just won’t do. Never heard of it being as fragile as it is being in your case, though, but it just goes to show that it has some fundamental issues.

I consider this guide as a “starter” for people who don’t know ActionScript or Flash initially, and haven’t got a windows machine or the money to splash out on Flash IDE. Once they’ve got started, they almost certainly want to move on to mature supported systems like flex or haxe.

I would like to thank the creator of this tutorial, i think it’s very well made. Only one thing, I think the part where you explain how to create and set the score bar is a little confused. For example, you don’t tell the reader that he has to create a new layer.

Sorry for resurrecting a dead topic, but it’s stickied anyway and I really need to ask this question.

Everything works fine…except that every so often a stage-wide horizontal flickering line (a scanline?) travels slowly from the top to the bottom of the stage. I tried to record a video of this with CamStudio and even by recording my screen with my webcam, but teh flickering line won’t show up in the videos, which just makes the whole thign even more irritating.

I can’t recall this happening in any other Flash game I’ve played – just in this one. Does anyone know what might be going on?

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